UK.gov is calling on developers to consult the Cabinet Office on its prototype website that will open some government datasets to the public.
It wants the developer community to get involved in shaping what apps, data sources and features the website should contain.
“With over 1,000 existing data sets, from seven departments …

why?

Don't developers work enough for free (out of hours debugging, coding and fire-fighting), not to mention the way contractors have been hounded like we're some kind of terrorists rather than slightly enterprising skilled workers....and while the government will happily shell out 10+ billion on some idiot IT managers and the like to make a big mess of the NHS project, us devs are asked to work for free.

I am sure they will find some saps foolish enough to devalue themselves out of a future career ...

Public data

Re: Tell us how to develop it...

Given how everyone here seems to think that they can do better than anything the government comes up with, here's a golden opportunity to do it. Think of it as a chance to show how having loads of free developers can only make things better. Even when you're not paid and don't do any of the typing (of course, that's just the donkey work after you've done all the design and pretty diagrams,) you can bask in the - warm, fuzzy feeling, as I recall one of you described it. Government gets a perfect system and people get employment implementing it. Two things for you all to feel smug about. Win-win, eh?

Simple

Make available all data that there's no specific (and good) reason not to provide. For a start, that's all non-personal non-security-sensitive data. And don't leave out any details just because you can't think why anyone would want them.

Do it in an open format (XML, CSV, HTML, plain text, etc).

Make everything bookmarkable so we can cross-reference it from citizen-generated data such as a massive sousveillance database :-).

My main (and largely rhetorical) question is why weren't they at this stage ten years ago?